I'd recommend A Ghost Story if you want to meditate on what it would be like to be a ghost, it's pretty comprehensive. If you get hung up on the pie scene, you're not going to enjoy it, but move beyond that and you have a contemplation of time and its effects on the soul. Plus Casey Affleck is a creepy bastard, so good casting for a ghost (in a sheet).
I'm not surprised that this film bypassed the entire mainstream, and most of our movie buff membership as well. I'm suggesting right now that this will become a huge cult fave. I'd pushed past the dvd cover a few times before last night hearing the beginning of one positive review from Jay Bauman and Mike Stoklasa (Red Letter Media) and I watched it. By the end of it, I had begun to suspect that the creators of this beautiful poem had thrown up walls of simplisticism precisely to keep out the unwanted, the impatient hipsters, the aloof critiqual condescenders and the brute blockmentals in one or two fell swoops. The first sign of a work of genius.
The second is the pacing. Lowery has constructed this thing with gears, in an automotive transmission sense. The first third of the film is going to sort the wheat from the chaff, but if you endure you will be rewarded with an incredible experience of revelation, indeed elevation, as the conceptual framework materialises in your synapses before you understand what you've been caught up in. Gradually, I fell in love. Quite sincerely.
That's the third. The framing concept is very simple. It's a theme I've harped on about at length in other threads (eg Nightmare of eternal descent; Our relationship with the planet we inhabit), and it involves
the shift in human consciousness from pure time-bound subjectivity into an enlightened objectivity of perception. Lowery doesn't make it into too grand a scenario; rather, he takes us through the process with great skill, subtlety, personality and tenderness. He doesn't go large scale with a sweeping 'Age of Aquarius' type mass movement, but keeps the premise pretty much at an individual level. It works better. I'm alone. The ghost is alone, and yet he has never really been alone. I'd thoughts at a few points it was proposing a reincarnation theme, but I doubt that now. I'm sensing something much more in tune with perhaps what John Dobson's (visit A Sidewalk Astronomer) cosmology was about, that underpinning our Newtonian physics is a recycling of experience that is universal, incompatible with religious doctrine (he came it from Vedanta and found that wanting -
paraphrase "physics must accommodate Vedanta, and Vedanta must accommodate physics"). There's a fundamental, yet invisible redshift occurring through each of us that melds our conscious subjective experience of life with the metaconsciousness of the cosmos in an eternal outplay of vitality and reduction and revitality. I don't know how to put it less awkwardly - the English language has its limitations. And this is another point in the film's favour - it transcends language. I earlier called the film a poem for that reason. It's Zen. It's Tao. Its a meditation. The film breathes in and it breathes out and it breathes in and it breathes out. Sorry. I gush. I'm thrilled because I've been waiting for this a long time.
I can't really expose plot details because they are kind of irrelevant to the big picture Lowery is painting. As with all great works of art, it makes the viewer question themselves, and at the end there was one prominent question on my mind.
Either it all matters, or it all doesn't. And Lowery doesn't make up your mind for you. God bless him.
5/5